Riaan Cruywagen Says Goodbye to SABC News

A while ago I did a post about Riaan Cruywagen announcing his retirement after 37 years with SABC News. His career has come to an end as Cruywagen read the Afrikaans news on SABC 2 for last time last night.

Riaan Cruywagen has become a South African icon and will live in the annals of history. To give you an idea, five minutes into his final broadcast last night, he was already trending on Twitter. He knocked new South African cricket sensation Faf du Plessis off the top spot. It just gives you the idea of how much people have come to love him over the years and how many people watched his final broadcast.

Yesterday was exactly 37 years to the day that Riaan Cruywagen first appeared on South African television. On the 26th of November 1975 the main news headline had been the sentencing of poet Breyten Breytenbach to nine years in jail. He was already working for the SABC for 10 years when he started reading the news on television.

Over the decades he read more than 8,000 news bulletins for SABC News. He’s probably one of the most hardworking anchormen in global history. To give you an idea, in the United States legendary CBS newsreader Walter Cronchite was on television for only 19 years. Over the years Cruywagen remained true to his profession and nothing else. He never became involved in politics (external nor internal) and he made it his duty to present the news in an unbiased, non-partisan and objective, credible and authoritative way.

Riaan Cruywagen will be missed, there’s almost no doubt about that. The news will not be the same without him. He is looking forward to enjoy his retirement and aims to spend more time with this family since he has been mostly working in the evenings after all.

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